"Now, Custis!" she gasped. "Oh, God, now!"
He had already moved between her widespread thighs, balancing there on his knees. His manhood was only inches away from her fiery center. He drove forward with a thrust of his hips and found the gates of her womanhood open wide for him. She gasped again as he entered her, filling her deeply and completely. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and held on to him with surprising strength. The muscles of her femininity clenched on him as well, their grip so hot and tight that he almost lost control right away.
With a groan of effort, he exerted his iron will and forced down the reaction that was building within him. Neither of them were ready for this to be over yet. His hips began to move as he withdrew almost all the way, then plunged into her again.
"Harder!" she panted. "Harder!"
Longarm drove in and out, filling her to the brim, then pulling back. Both of them were breathing fast now, and Longarm could hear the thunder of his pulse inside his head. Annie plastered her mouth to his and her tongue shot into his mouth, plundering him as he was plundering her down below. The rest of the world had retreated, leaving only the two of them, and the only sounds to be heard on the entire planet were the rasp of their breath, the liquid movement of heated flesh within flesh, and the faint slapping of belly against belly.
Then Annie tore her mouth away from his and began to make a small, keening sound as her head thrashed from side to side on the bed. Longarm knew she had reached her culmination, so he held back no longer. He plunged deeply within her again, as deep as he could go, and held his shaft there as great, shuddery spasms shook him. His seed exploded from him in spurt after spurt, draining him and filling her in the eternal siphon of passion. Finally, with another shudder and jerk, the last of it welled from him. Sated, he slipped from her and rolled to the side, because he knew that if he didn't get off her, his weight would crush her as his muscles turned to jelly and he could no longer support himself on his elbows and knees.
Annie snuggled against his side, resting her head on his chest as he looped an arm around her and held her to him. Breathlessly, she said, "I am... so glad you... came to New Orleans, Custis."
He brushed his lips against her hair and murmured, "So am I."
In truth, his first day here had gone stunningly well. He had made progress on the job that had brought him to the Crescent City, and he had bedded a lovely, passionate woman whom he hadn't even known when this morning dawned. Too much good luck?
Longarm wondered how that trip down to the Delta country with Jasper Millard was going to go the next day.
CHAPTER 6
Longarm said, "Damn!" and swatted at the mosquito busily feasting on his neck. Beside him, Jasper Millard laughed.
"You stay down here in this country for very long, Parker," said Millard, "and you'll get to where you don't even notice those little bastards."
"That one wasn't so little," Longarm said as he studied the squashed insect on the palm of his hand. Its death had left a smear of blood on his skin. His own blood, thought Longarm, which the varmint had just sucked out of him. "These things get much bigger, they're liable to start carrying off dogs."
Millard chuckled again. He and Longarm were riding side by side along a road that followed the twisting course of a bayou. It was mid-morning and already quite hot, even though the cypress trees that bordered the road cast quite a bit of shade. Long strands of Spanish moss dangling from the branches brushed against Longarm's face from time to time. A warm breeze that was as lazy as the almost imperceptible current of the bayou brought a mixture of pungent smells to Longarm. The most prominent was that of the rich brown earth, but he also smelled the sweetness of honeysuckle and bougainvillea as well as the sharper tang of rotting fish. All in all, it was a blend that took some getting used to.
He had left his coat and vest behind today, though he still wore the string tie around his neck. His white shirt was already soaked with sweat. He had rolled the sleeves up for a while, but exposing his brawny forearms just gave the mosquitos more places to bite him. The sleeves were rolled down now. He wore brown whipcord pants and his usual black stovepipe boots. Millard had complimented him on the high-topped boots. "They're good for tromping around the bayou country," Millard had said. "Helps keep the rattlers and the cottonmouths and the copperheads and the coral snakes from biting you."
What kind of place was it, Longarm wondered, that had so many venomous snakes? Weren't one or two kinds enough?
The area was teeming with wildlife. So far he had seen deer and squirrels and skunks and opossums. A couple of times he had spotted what he first thought were logs floating in the water, and then he had seen the tiny black eyes protruding from the surface of the bayou. Those were alligators out there, he realized, gators just like the one that had chomped half of Douglas Ramsey's body. Maybe one of them was the same gator, for all he knew. A chill went through him at the thought, but he managed not to shudder.
From time to time, Longarm and Millard passed shacks with palmetto-thatched roofs. The shacks were built of unpainted, weather-bleached boards and were set atop stilts, and many of them leaned a little--whether from shoddy construction or the hurricane winds that sometimes blew from the Gulf, Longarm didn't know. Beside the shacks were small patches of garden. Cows and pigs and chickens were confined in ramshackle pens. Some of the shacks backed up to the bayou or even extended over the water on their stilts, and pirogues were tied up at these. The lightweight canoes drew very little water, Longarm knew. He had heard it said that they could float on a heavy dew.
Sometimes narrow, pinched, sunburned faces peered out at the two riders from the windows or porches of the shacks. Millard ignored the Cajuns as he rode past. Longarm felt a pang of sympathy for them, then wondered if the emotion was misplaced. These people who lived in the bayou country were a breed apart in some ways; hard though it might be, this life was the only one they knew, and Longarm suspected that most of them would never be happy anywhere else.
Another bayou joined the one they were following, and the water grew wider to their left. Millard waved at a field of flowers to the right and said, "Looks solid, doesn't it?"
"I reckon it does," said Longarm.
"You wouldn't want to ride across there. You wouldn't make it five feet before your horse was bogged down in mud up to its belly. In fact, almost anywhere you go off this road it would be like that."
Longarm looked around. The landscape appeared to be tall grass prairie for the most part, sprinkled with fields full of flowers. Even without Millard's warning, though, he would have known from past visits to this area that appearances were deceiving. Any man who strayed off known paths ran the risk of winding up in quicksand or water over his head with little or no warning.
The cypress trees thinned out and gradually vanished, and Longarm and Millard entered a region of long, shallow ridges covered with rows of stunted oaks. "Shinneries," grunted Millard, pointing at the ridges with a thumb. "That's where we'll find the men we're looking for."
A few minutes later, he turned his horse and rode onto one of the ridges that crossed the path. Longarm followed. The shinnery oaks provided a little shade from the sun, which was climbing higher and higher in the sky and growing warmer as it climbed. The cypresses, with their spreading limbs and shawls of Spanish moss, had given better shade, but Longarm was grateful for anything that blocked the blasting rays of the sun.